Caitlin Emmaof Politico.com paid a visit to Finland and was surprised to discover that teachers are not depending on educational technology. By contrast, American schools are spending billions of dollars on tablets, laptops, and other devices.
She writes:
“Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there.
“That’s in stark contrast to what reformers in the U.S. say. From President Barack Obama on down, they have called education technology critical to improving schools. By shifting around $2 billion in existing funds and soliciting $2 billion in contributions from private companies, the Obama administration is pressing to expand schools’ access to broadband and the devices that thrive on it.
“School districts nationwide have loaded up students with billions of dollars’ worth of tablets, laptops, iPods and more on the theory that, as Obama said last year, preparing American kids to compete with students around the globe will require interactive, individualized learning experiences driven by new technology.”
(Since the research on the benefits of technology is sparse, it is likely that the heavy U.S. investment in technology is driven by something other than research.)
The Finnish secret: recruiting excellent students into the teaching profession, which is respected and prestigious; according the teachers professional autonomy; working closely with the educators’ union to promote better education; no standardized testing until the end of high school; no charters; no vouchers.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/finland-school-system-107137.html#ixzz332KBNyYL
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But this is Obama, Arne Duncan and Bill Gate’s favorite way to fight poverty. Spend billions on Ed Tech but not one more cent for schools and early childhood education programs for children living in poverty. Do you think speeding billions for Apple iPads will take a child from poverty and motivate them to work harder in school so they grow up and join the middle class?
I worked with children who lived in poverty for thirty years and I know an Apple iPad will not change anything. All the iPad will become is an expensive toy—another form of TV to distract children from reading and doing homework. In fact, I was born to poverty and grew up as a child in poverty. I know!
“Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child’s educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions. Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/
Where does America rank in early childhood education programs? Watch the video and find out.
My students use laptops to download rap videos and to access their Facebook accounts. They also watch movies. It is all very educational. Teachers are instructed not to log on students. I tell the kids that I could be fired if anyone catches them and they think it is one big joke.
Back in the early 1990s, we had a computer lab in the high school library. One day in December when our ninth graders were in the library learning how to use the Internet for research in that lab, two boys were caught looking at a porno site and the district has filters that were supposed to stop that from happening. The librarian caught the boys when they should have been paying attention to her lesson. Me and one other teacher heard her anger from the other end of the library and quickly went to the computer area to find out what had happened.
The two boys both belonged to street gangs and combined they had more than thirty referrals to the office for disrupting the learning environment in their classes. The laws even then were so restrictive that it was almost impossible to get rid of these kids or send them someplace tougher because somewhere tougher didn’t exist unless it was a prison.
There was also a computer reading lab with a class set of desktop IBMs that were not linked to the Internet. The computers were used to teach reading to high school students who read way below grade level. Kids shoved gum in the disk drives and stole the caps off letters on the keyboards because they were bored using those programs that were supposed to motivate them to read more and improve. The lab had been put in with a $50,000 grant and two years later, those computers were moved to a storage room and the reading teachers went back to using the older reading kits that came in boxes and were printed on paper.
Hi Tech equipment is also a target for thieves. The library was broken into at least once that I know of and everything inside that was He Tech was carted off. What they didn’t take, they destroyed using pry bars to break the computers, TVs and VCRs from the carts they were locked to.
You give thousands of kids who live in poverty an Apple iPad worth several hundred dollars and the odds are many of them will vanish and end up being sold in swap meets.
It is about the end game. 1 curriculum. 1 provider of text books and tests. Charters funded by billionaires who will profit off the taxpayers, so the monies are channelled directly back to them.
Eliminate the teachers, take the voters out of the decisions, eliminate public schools, then take the online learning, blended in the charter schools, and start to refocus on the online classes, eliminating the clerks (teachers).
Mine the data, skew the data, send some kids to college (which eventually won’t be brick and mortar either) and some to university where the rich kids will attend.
Its about the end, where the profiteers stand to control it all, one big monopoly, and benefit financially.
Why is America exporting our tax dollars on education to England? Something is fundamentally wrong right there.
This is going to be a long arduous fight.
This is a great little video!
BTW, Achieve led with this PISA score nonsense on its website for a long, long time.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
But this is Obama, Arne Duncan and Bill Gate’s favorite way to fight poverty. Spend billions on Ed Tech but not one more cent for schools and early childhood education programs for children living in poverty. Do you think speeding billions for Apple iPads will take a child from poverty and motivate them to work harder in school so they grow up and join the middle class?
I worked with children who lived in poverty for thirty years and I know an Apple iPad will not change anything. All the iPad will become is an expensive toy—another form of TV to distract children from reading and doing homework. In fact, I was born to poverty and grew up as a child in poverty. I know!
“Educational outcomes are one of the key areas influenced by family incomes. Children from low-income families often start school already behind their peers who come from more affluent families, as shown in measures of school readiness. The incidence, depth, duration and timing of poverty all influence a child’s educational attainment, along with community characteristics and social networks. However, both Canadian and international interventions have shown that the effects of poverty can be reduced using sustainable interventions. Paediatricians and family doctors have many opportunities to influence readiness for school and educational success in primary care settings.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/
Where does America rank in early childhood education programs? Watch the video and find out.
An Apple iPad does not equal high quality material that may be used in the classroom. That choice must be left up to teachers—not politicians or billionaires like Bill Gates.
Excellent post, Lloyd! So true.
Lloyd..I agree with most of your comments, insightful as always.
But we have to consider which high school students are directed to which colleges, and which careers. In California, the largest number of students who choose teaching as their profession attend the public California State University system with the multitude of campuses available to them and needing only a C average to be accepted.
Other teacher training, university level, programs such as at the public University of California campuses, require an A to A+ average (especially UCLA and Berkeley). It is clear to the rational world that the prime students will attend the school that offers the more rigourous training to the more academically qualified students.
Therefore it follows that the reality is the greatest number of credentialed teachers in our state come from Cal State. As some of our colleagues on this blog attest, perhaps it is not necessary for all teachers to have been the star students themselves…and in a number of scenarios this is true e.g. the arts. But in core subjects leading to careers in science, education, and competitive jobs on the world stage, we need the best teachers of math, science, language, etc.. And of course the very best professors should be teaching those students. It has been my observaton for over 40 years in this field, that we need a paradigm turnaround in many cases.
However, in the small country of Finland, where there is total language and ethnic similarity so they do not face the challenges of our mass of diverse populations, they treat educators with respect and equity, recognizing the need for the best teachers to teach successful students…a much easier job in Finland’s single religion, single color, single nationality, single language nation. I will never understand why so many people continue to compare tiny, uniquely singular, Finland, to the huge crime-filled, poverty stricken, culturally diverse (Balkinized in Los Angeles and other of our huge cities in insular ethnic communities) United States, with our gravely dangerous economic inequality and the crazed politicians of our rapidly diminishing democratic republic, who divide us even more.
If American wanted the same results as Finland, with our hard to teach diverse communities, then money would be allocated for salaries competitve with industry, and teachers would all be chosen from the top scoring high school students, and taught by amazingly good professors such as Madelyn Hunter. America does not value education, nor does it value academic ability enough to invest in it. It values only money. It is only ruled by endless governmental edicts and smoke and mirrors public policies that we are handed, and then told to turn out Einsteins on the business models of investing only enough to turn out Mickey Mouse.
We old timers remember better days…and thankfully we have some younger educators such as Carol Burris (and many of our site buddies here) who are so well trained and motivated and have such courage to speak out, that maybe….maybe…there is hope to turn it around. We need more vocational education, and more respect for the trades people they produce…who truly affect our everyday lives when we are desparate for good plumbers, electricians, mechanics, computer servicers, nursing care, erc. We do not need every child to be directed to college….and we do not need any more ill trained teachers who cannot spell, do simple math, or create clear sentences and use logical critical thinking skills..or those who have given up the fight. And most of all, we do not need nonsensical educational investment opportunities mandated by the oligarchs.
The unions are not always right, the teachers are not always right, the public is not always right…but the government and their billionaire masters (at least the last two Presidents), are generally always wrong.
Hope I do not make lots of new enemies with this statement.
After you watch the video, please explain how our sub-par public-school teachers who earned their teaching credentials in colleges that accepted 2.0 GPAs did better than every other countries on the PISA when we break the scores down so we compare apples to apples—the average ranking used by the fake education reformers doesn’t work for a fair comparison.
I’ve seen the primary sources for all the facts mentioned in this video and written about them on my Blog. What they say is true.
Let’s forget Finland and consider France vs. the U.S. France may be closer to the challenges the U.S. faces.
“As of 2008, the French national institute of statistics INSEE estimated that 11.8 million foreign-born immigrants and their direct descendants (limited to 2nd generation born in France) lived in France representing 19% of the country’s population. More than 5.5 million are of European origin and about 4 million of Maghrebi origin (20% of Algerian origin and 15% of Moroccan or Tunisian origin). Immigrants age 18–50 count for 2.7 million (10% of population age 18–50) and 5 million for all ages (8% of population). The second generation age 18–50 make up 3.1 million (12% of 18–50) and 6.5 million for all ages (11% of population). Without considering citizenship at birth, people not born in metropolitan France and their direct descendants made up 30% of the population aged 18–50 in metropolitan France as of 2008.”
If you click the following link, you’ll discover that France is ranked number one for the number of children at age 4 enrolled in early childhood education programs but the United States ranks 28th among 38 OECD and G20 countries. Yet, even with that burden, the U.S., when we compare apples to apples on the PISA, but beats them all with those too many so-called “C” average teachers the fake education reformers want to punish because their GPA wasn’t high enough in college.
Click to access CN%20-%20United%20States.pdf
And what has been the result of an early childhood education program that reaches 100% of France’s children at age 4?
Poverty in France has fallen by 60% over thirty years. Although it affected 15% of the population in 1970, in 2001 only 6.1% (or 3.7 million people) were below the poverty line.
When we compare apples to apples, schools in France vs the U.S. with poverty rates in schools below 10%, the U.S. PISA score was 551 and France was 496. Finding schools in France with poverty rates above 10% will be difficult. Twenty-three percent of U.S. children live in poverty compared to 6.1% in France.
How did the U.S. beat France—in fact beat every OECD country when we compared apples to apples instead of the average which is like comparing an ice cube to molten lava and expecting them to have the same qualities?
I don’t think that a high GPA from college equals dedication or quality when it comes to teaching. I’m convinced that there are teachers who graduated with a lower GPA who are better teachers than someone who graduated with a higher GPA.
There’s a lot more to teaching than a high GPA. Thinking that teachers must earn a high GPA in college to be better teachers in the classroom is the same as claiming that a high IQ automatically make one a better person who has a better chance to succeed in life and that motivation and dedication have nothing to do with success.
Lloyd…I have watched the video twice and I think you and I are really on the same page. Yes, I always agree that the stats must be adjusted for the huge poverty rate in the US. But the PISA report finds that the US is low in math…and my thesis is that all students, ELL, inner city students, and slow/different learners, require and deserve the best trained math teachers, A TFA newbie may have just graduated from Princeton with a math major and a 4.0 GPA…and it does not make her/him the best teacher because they did not have the training skills to convey their knowledge of math to a class of 50 teen agers who may have 10 per cent ADHD in the room. It is only with outstanding professors teaching them how to teach that they can succeed.
Part of the problem is with the university teaching.
Also, I have observed classrooms all across the country and find strange anachronisms such as a young teacher in rural Texas using archaic teaching methods and a text book written in the 1930s which using outdated language like the term “frock” for a dress. Every child in this 3rd grade room can read the page, but not one knows what a frock is. Some of the best reading skills I have ever seen was in another 3rd grade room in a working class neighborhood in So. California where there were 4 aides in the room and the class was divided according to ability, with aides speaking Spanish to ELL kids. Their reading scores were as high as WLA schools due to the factors of not forcing total English immersion too soon, and individual caring attention.
Their are so many variables that it is impossible to make too many hard and fast assumptions and rules to cover everyone. That is what Obama/Duncan do not understand. They do not have the input of the educational researchers who spend their lives doing teacher/pupil classroon observations, data collection and analysis. And the absolutely worst schools I have seen were in their city…Chicago, where the North side upper bracket kids are thriving, and the S. side inner city kids are in big trouble. Duncan did not succeed in making any change there, nor did Obama’s first lady of school board members who O rewarded for her donations by making her a member of his Cabinet, the enormously wealthy Madame Pritzker.
There just are not clear cut, one size fits all, methods in the US for either teacher or pupils. And that is another reason we cannot emulate Finland where the similarity of population makes is far easier to educate everyone. I would like to see however, three mandated classes for every single American student in about tenth grade. First a class in parenting, second a class in money management teaching the basic skills of how not to incur debt nor pay interest (simple economics), and third a class in civics where voting and public policy are taught to be an informed and productive citizen. All other subjects can be decided by local school boards, but keeping all religion out of the classrooms unless it is a course in comparative religion.
You say: “PISA report finds that the US is low in math”. Technically, that claim is correct but when we look closer it’s misleading.
Actually that U.S. “mean” (of 481) was close to the OECD “mean” of 494 and the U.S. “mean” improved by .3% over the 2009 PISA score. In addition, the OECD share of low achievers who took the test was 23.0% versus 25.8% in the U.S., and it was found on closer examination of the test that the United States tested more low achievers who lived in poverty than the OECD average and still gained compared to the 2009 test. If we use the misleading but highest score that comes from Shanghai, China (613) and come up with a percentage, the U.S. was only 2.1% below the OECD “mean” but had improved over the 2009 “mean”.
For a more accurate comparison, we must exclude all the Asian countries and go with Liechtenstein (535) or Switzerland that had a PISA “mean” in Math of 531 and use that as our base. Then the U.S. tests at 90.6% of the new top score for an A- if we translate it into a letter grade. Not bad for a country with a 23% poverty rate and too many teachers who were trained in state colleges that accept 2.0 GPAs into those programs.
Now, let’s take a closer look: The U.S. has a childhood poverty rate of 23% compared to Finland with less than a 5% poverty rate and France that has less than 7% while the average OECD country has 15% poverty rates. And even with that vast difference in poverty rates, the U.S. still beats them all when we take poverty into the equation for PISA comparisons and compare schools with similar poverty rates. Among OECD nations, it is very difficult to find schools with poverty rates above 50%. I taught in a schools that had a poverty rate higher than 70% and today that rate is about 80%. Mexico and Turkey were two countries that had schools with similar poverty rates, and similar schools in the U.S. beat them both on the PISA by a healthy margin.
You say: “Part of the problem is with the university teaching”.
What is the solution, more Teach for America where their foolish recruit’s with high GPAs end up with a few hours of training over a period of five weeks? I took night classes for an entire school year (1975-76) and one summer quarter in addition to interning full time in a paid position with a master teacher in her classroom in the same school district where I would teach until 2005. And I earned my teaching credential from a state college.
You say, “I have observed classrooms all across the country and find strange anachronisms such as a young teacher in rural Texas using archaic teaching methods and a text book written in the 1930s which using outdated language like the term “frock” for a dress.”
I submit that this isn’t the fault of college teaching programs but state and district funding that doesn’t provide enough money to buy new material in addition to keeping the infrastructure repaired and up to date. The Public schools are often starved for funds. Did you notice in that video that the fake education reformers add in public funds that support public colleges but when we removed that funding from the equation our K-12 public schools are not getting as much money as the fake education reformers claim.
For instance, when I started teaching, there were not enough textbooks for me so I created my own material and at the end of that year, I had hundreds of lessons I created using one out-of-date, old, damaged, graffiti littered, textbook as a guide that was loaned to me by a veteran teacher in that school’s English department. The English teachers at that school only had one class set of these old, damaged books each and were teaching six classes with more than 200 students total in an area with a poverty rate above 70%. The kids didn’t have their own textbooks. That wasn’t the fault of the college where all those teachers earned their teaching credentials.
You’re right, we can’t emulate Finland or any other country because every country is different with different challenges and one of America’s challenges is that 23% poverty rate and under-funded K-12 public education where teachers are not part of the decision making but are blamed for the failures of those decisions often made by ignorant politicians at the school board, city, state and national level all the way to Congress and the White House. President Obama and the U.S. Congress are all fools when it comes to what it takes to educate children.
As for teacher training, no matter the quality of the training, few teachers will be ready for the reality of the classroom when they start teaching and it takes several years with support from veteran teacher’s at the same school to gain the experience and skills necessary to deal with the challenges that walk in that class room doorway every day. There have been studies that point out when veteran teachers retire and the remaining teachers lack that experience that comes with years, the test scores for those schools drop.
At my first full time teaching gig, I worked at a school for several years where the teachers would line the kids up outside the classrooms before the teaching day started and frisk them for weapons. Female teachers frisked the girls and even ran their fingers through their hair where they often hid razor blades.
One teacher carried a bucket where the knives, razor blades and shards of broken glass would be dumped and then we marched the kids into the classrooms. I taught classes with kids who were known as shooters and that meant they had killed rival gang members. I had one kid who had killed a dozen by the time he reached 7th grade and he had a price on his head.
I return to my argument that a college GPA has nothing to do with teacher quality, and the U.S. needs to fully fund early childhood education in every state that includes parenting classes for every parent who lives in poverty.
Just came back to this stream days later…Lloyd…you make claims about teaching that I quustion…and now I will speak as a parent as well as a lifetime educator, as you do.
My son was a math whiz by 4th grade and I found a Jr.HS math teacher to work (for payments) with him on advanced math so he did not lose interest in school. His teacher had him grading papers for there was nothing that teacher knew about math that my son did not. By 7th grade i could not find a local public school that challenged him. A coach was assigned to teach 7th grade math…but he did not even know how to reduce fractions…so when he tested my son who was already doing calculus (and at 12, was tutoring math for other kids and earning $10 an hour), he failied him for reducing fractions. I was beside myself at this egregious choice of a baseball coach used to teach math. I immediately put my son in the best private school I could find where he graduated after 11th grade…and went off to the a major Ivy League university and double majored in chemistry and economics (both of which are math based), and when he graduated cum laude with three concurrent degrees at 20 years old, and then got a JD/MBA by 24, his future was assured.
This was economically a huge challenge for a professional educator, single parent but he immediately earned a good salary (his starting pay was larger than my lifetime ending pay) he rapidly paid off his huge student loans.
Many American parents face this dilemna for their children and it is particularly difficult for inner city parents of gifted children. (That is why they are moving their children to charter schools.) I reiterate that in California, some Cal State trained teachers are too often not of the same caliber as many U of C students, in core subjects, and not prepared to teach core subjects in the higher grades…and they are not the best teachers for AP courses. And it is the core subjects that propel students into good grad schools, and from there, into good jobs. This is not a battle of GPA numbers…it is reality.
Granted that some CalState students are briliant and do a dazzling job in their chosen careers (just as the small contingent of dunderheads that the U of C sometimes produces), but had to choose the state school due to the lower tuition…and other assorted unique instances.
I admit that even my qualified comments paint the system with one brush stroke of generalizations and I apologize in advance for any hurt feelings my words may cause. It is my lifetime as an educational researcher, and dealing with data, as well as empiric classroom observations that bring me to these statements. And still, I choose to fight for teachers rights and for our public schools.
Now I run into teachers and administrators who have only had their training at online schools like U. of Phoenix, National University, and the like, and minimally qualified schools like La Verne, etc. This leads, has led, in time to the downgrading of all education. These semi-pseudo schools, though accredited, are in no way as academically rigorous as California’s two state universities. When you read their students theses, it more like a 10th grade high school paper. The grammar and spelling is atrocious, and they lack the critical thinking skills on which other higher ed focuses. I sadly have seen this as well in major universites where ill-equiped students of education try to get a PhD and stay in the program for decades…and continually have their dissertations rejected for insufficiency.
In the 1960s, when the laws in California permitted anyone to open a law school, or other institution of higher ed, the quality of education began to spiral downward. We are left with a multitude of ill trained lawyers who become mainly ‘slip and fall’ hucksters, it is the same for other professions, even teaching, which has not been helped by meager schools of education.
So this is where Finland beats us. They choose the best students for teacher training and they retain them for a lifetime by allowing them to be fully unionized, and pay them at the level of their doctors and lawyers. The US looks at teachers in the same realm as firemen, nurses, and skilled laborers, but pays them at an even lower rate. They are seen as a necessary group to run society, but on a very low level.
This is the end of this diatribe….I love and respect most educators. and have been one for over 40 years…but I personally am not qualified to teach math nor foreign language nor the sciences….but I can do a good job of teaching public policy, and yes, even literature. That is the point I am making. And for the record, I did attend U of C.
You said: “Lloyd…you make claims about teaching that I quustion…”
For thirty years, I taught in public schools with high levels of poverty. What I say is based on my experience as a teacher in one California public school district with about 19,000 students. I would like to know what you think I’m saying that is a questionable claim. I want to make sure what you are calling a claim is a claim and not from my experiences in teaching.
You seem to be basing your experience on your son, the math whiz, and a few teachers who just didn’t measure up with what you wanted for your son. I’m basing my experience on teaching about 6,000 kids over thirty years. I worked mostly with kids at the low end of literacy skills and motivation.
You can read about my experiences working with the high achievers at the high school where I taught here:
http://www.mysplendidconcubine.com/teachingyears.htm
When my “Crazy is Normal” memoir comes out in a few weeks, you can read about both the low and high achievers I worked with for one year—the year I kept a very detailed daily journal that is the primary source for this memoir.
As for gifted children who are often in the minority in schools with high rates of poverty, if the funds aren’t there, the programs won’t be there either. A school district works with what it has and funds from taxes and the state limit what they can provide.
You seem to think that these Charter schools offer better programs and I wouldn’t be surprised since these school are cherry picking the students and getting rid of all or most of the at-risk kids who are the most difficult to teach. When all is said and done, the for profit charters end up only with the high achievers who have supportive parents, and the rest are sent back to underfunded public schools with highly stressed teachers.
Lloyd…I am surprised that you continue to misread my comments. No where have I ever said that charter schools “offer better programs” than public schools for children on any socio economic group, and particularly for children from poverty stricken backgrounds. If you read my comments here for the past almost two years, and google my articles written here, and at Schools Matter, and at Chalkface, and at K12 News Network and at Hemlock on the Rocks, etc. you will see that our views are generally similar as to what works and what doesn’t.
I have read your posts here and at our Education Bloggers group as to the dossiers of your wife, your daughter who is now at Stanford, and yourself, and have found them most interesting. I have worked for over 40 years as an educational researcher in the most difficult, poverty stricken, school districts in the country, and all the studies look into what is actually working, and what is failing.
It is only because you have often written about your own experiences as a teacher and a parent that I responded in kind. I am however, tired of the assumptions that all teachers are equally trained and equally capable of teaching core subjects at all academic levels. The long term data shows this is just not so. Some teachers who have early childhood ed credentials are amazingly adept with small children, but they are not trained to teach calculus. I am sure you would prefer that your child be taught higher math by somone who was a math major (and who may not have the patience and skill to teach 7 year olds). This is the point I have been hammering on.
I think we both might be boring the rest of our colleagues with our current parry and thrust, so I suggest we do this off these sites.
I enjoy your insights so please feel free to reach me at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
Let’s see, there are 50 states (meaning 50 different programs required for teacher credentialing based on the legislation of each state), 13,600 school districts, 3.3+ million teachers, almost 50 million children attending almost 100,000 schools, and when apples are compared to apples on the PISA, the U.S. is number one among OECD nations even putting Finland in second place when schools with 10% or less poverty are compared.
Is there room for improving teacher training? Yes. There is always room for improvement.
But I don’t think it’s a crises situation.
There will always be situations where districts will seek an emergency credential for a teacher to teach in a subject area they aren’t credentialed in. I saw it happen in the district where I taught but from my experience it wasn’t a widespread practice. Most of the teachers were teaching in the area of their BA/BS degree. But I can’t speak for the other 13,599 districts or the other 49 states.
For instance—another story about our daughter—in her ninth grade year, her English teacher went out on maternity leave and a long-term sub replaced her. The sub couldn’t control the kids behavior and couldn’t teach. I complained to the principal and the subs were changed to a veteran, retired teacher who had taught for fifty years, and I checked the state standards for that year of English and grilled our daughter about the work she was doing in class to figure out what she had missed during the months the bad sub had been there—her regular teacher had complications and stayed out the rest of the year. Then I planned lessons at home to fill in the gaps. That was the only year we did anything like that. It sounds like you did the same thing with the bad math teacher.
I wonder what states have the easiest teacher credentialing programs and what states have the toughest ones.
Stuff happens, nothing is perfect but the U.S. has had nothing but steady improvement for decades. Diane has documented that improvement in her book, “Reign of Error”.
Very smart decision by the Finns!
Teaching: There Is No App for That
It’s amazing to me that billionaires and politicians (often yhe same people) think its “cheaper” to spend sid millions on tech, tests and consultants than hiring more teachers to reduce student/teacher ratios and paying workers/teacers higher wages/salaries. I am quite sure that I could be a more effective teacher if I had fewer than 160-170 students, although Michael Bloomberg thiught
thought that I should teach 700!
I encourage all who are interested in educational technology to get a copy of Edward Tufte’s brilliant little pamphlet “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.” Tufte studied and reports in this extraordinarily interesting and entertaining and scary work the dumbing down of ideas that results from this mode of presentation, and EVERYTHING HE SAYS ABOUT POWERPOINT APPLIES TO MOST OF THE EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE THAT I HAVE SEEN.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
Really, everyone, the Tufte report on Powerpoint is actually the best thing I have ever read about educational technology, because it applies so well to most of what is being done in ed tech. Do yourself a favor and read this. It’s a very, very important paper. It’s a brief pamphlet, and Tufte doesn’t charge much for it. It’s definitely worth reading.
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
–Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
“For reeducation campaign, nothing is as good as the Auto Content Wizard.”
–Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
Sometimes you just disappoint me. What are your resources that say that research on benefits of technology are sparse? I’m going to call that BS and say that you are repeating propaganda not research. There are many studies that support that technologies used by learners. It took one small step to find this:
Click to access ISTE_policy_brief_student_achievement.pdf
When technology is in the hands of learners who then use said technology to create or represent what they know or can do (ie, making thinking visible), then I can say yes, technology does lead to achievement. It’s when teachers are using interactive white boards and document cameras that I can agree with you that technology in schools used in that manner does not affect achievement.
Technology is like a grocery truck and like a grocery truck filled with groceries, it’s the learning strategies in and of themselves that give technologies the ability to affect achievement. But to say there is no research and that technology does not have any effect on achievement is just plain balder dash.
I think Obama and Duncan have and are taking the wrong approach, using a “Carrot and Stick” approach to education, fails, Common Core fails. But even, Linda Darling Hammond doesn’t say that technology fails.
Think about schools in Mississippi’s Delta, poor schools, poor teachers, no resources. One of the best things we could do to improve that situation would be to use erate and link those schools to high speed internet. Provide access to resources that they cannot alone afford, give them access to better teaching and teachers, give them access to the outside world and to succeed in school is an opportunity out of poverty.
Shame on you Diane, you should know better and you should not allow your personal biases to cloud your judgement or you risk your credibility.
Yes, there are studies of this stuff. Lots of studies of distance learning showing very low completion rates and very little learning going on. Lots of studies of virtual academies with the same problems. And there is the great Edward Tufte study of graphical computerized delivery of information that I cite above, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.”
I am a HUGE believer in ed tech done right. Done wrong it is extremely dangerous.
Trains can be used to send people to work and on vacation. They can be used to ship children from the Lodz Ghetto to the Chelmno death camp. Same technology, differently used, differently implemented.
Much of what is passing for ed tech these days fits Tufte’s description. Much of it is Push technology that dumbs down. And it has the potential for being an instrument of surveillance, command, control, and propagandizing. It doesn’t have to be that way. Tech can be liberating, enormously liberating, if it is implemented as PULL technology.
If it is used as a means for centralized command and control, if it is dumbed down, it turns the human transaction that is teaching and learning into one-way interactions with machines, we are in real trouble. That’s a recipe for totalitarianism and for mediocrity or worse.
I agree entirely that ed tech has enormous potential to bring great teaching to poor kids in far-flung places. We need to use this stuff wisely.
Teachers must be the decision makers when it comes to how to use EdTech in the classroom. Districts should offer introductory seminars—and training—but it should be voluntary every step of the way and up to teachers if EdTech of any kind is implemented and how it is used in the classroom.
Only through interaction between teachers and students will EdTech work, and dictatorial direction from above should be banned by law.
Teacher interaction! Teacher decision making! Teacher involvement!
This is what’s missing. Instead, we have someone like Bill Gates holding all the strings.
There is a lot of hype about ed tech. I have done an enormous amount of detailed study of ed tech products over the past few years. I have run across a few that are WONDERFUL for specific, generally quite limited purposes, and a LOT that are just dreadful but that look really, really slick. All hat, no cattle, as they say in Diane’s part of the country.
Agreed.
“. . . then I can say yes, technology does lead to achievement.”
Couldn’t care less about “achievement”. One of those business words that has been brought into education. If technology can help in the teaching and learning process, that’s fine but the fact is the usage of technology can not only be an enhancement but also a great discriminator as those with the most resources get to have a greater advantage and those with the least, well, let’s just say tough shit for them,
How did mankind survive and prosper up to this point without all this technology??
How did we prosper before all this technology? Which technology. Smart Phones? Laptops? Vaccines? Internal combustion engines, The plow? The Wheel? Fire?
David Warlick says it much better than me.
“My point? I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter. We know — that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.”
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2000/05/Grant-for-Technology-Education
First the CARET
Then the stick
“It’s when teachers are using interactive white boards and document cameras that I can agree with you that technology in schools used in that manner does not affect achievement.”
You lose a lot of credibility by making this blanket statement. I have a nearly endless number of classroom experiences that absolutely disprove this.
The whiteboard is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Used properly, it can be a breathtakingly powerful tool. I really don’t understand that blanket statement either.
One thing that teacher’s union leaders missed in their rush to take Gates money and promote David Colemans Powerpoint bullet list for U.S. education was this:
That list was paid for by Gates and Pearson because they needed one national list to tag their assessments and computerized learning software to. They wanted one list so that they could market one product “at scale.”
The whole point of that is to effect a disruptive revolution in PreK-12 schools that replaces teachers with teaching machines. Imagine 400 kids in a room, all doing worksheets on a screen, with a single low-paid aide walking around to make sure the tablets are working.
“Personalized education.”
So, the unions have made themselves instruments in a plan to reduce, dramatically, the number of teaching jobs in the country and thus to save a lot of many that can be spent on, guess what?
Computerized assessments and learning software
And the key piece that was necessary in order for this to happen was the national list of standards to tag the stuff to.
Thus the Ed Deformer motto, continually repeated by Students First, the Gates Foundation, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, etc., that “Class Size Doesn’t Matter.”
Bigger class sizes, fewer teachers, more apps, because “Teaching: There’s an App for That”
An app keyed to the Common Core list and feeding into into a single database and computerized learning gateway or portal.
Owned by, guess who?
Or, pedantically, “guess whom”
Sounds silly, doesn’t it? but that’s the objective case pronoun, object of the verb guess.
The reason why “Guess whom?” sounds awful and wrong is that it is. The whom is elliptical. It stands for an entire clause, and the pronoun is the subject of that clause and in the nominative case.
Guess who is coming to dinner?
Guess who [clause]?
You make a good point. I’m an instructional technology facilitator and a former classroom teacher. The day that vision you just laid out comes to pass, I will leave the profession. Technology can be a powerful tool for student creation. I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve made it happen. The people I work with in my district help our teachers change their teaching for the better by using technology to make it student driven and project and problem based. It can be done. The technology is not the problem. It’s the way some people want to use it.
Every student in my high-poverty school was given an iPad. I would say that I have given more F’s this year than I ever have before. Students no longer do homework. In class they are not paying attention. Students are on Snapchat, Facebook, or are playing games. Even when they should have their iPads open to an app we are working with, many are on their own sites texting their friends. When I have expressed concerns to my administrators, I have been told that the issue is a “discipline problem” that I must deal with. “Yes,” I want to scream, “but it’s a problem I did not ask for!” Occasionally students will have their iPads recalled when the tech department notices that they have deleted required files. I overheard one of my students from my honors-level class say, “I’m glad they took my iPad. Now I can get my homework done.” I don’t think my administration realized how addictive these devices can be. I have been in meetings where I have seen high-level administrators playing Candy Crush all through the meeting! During our initial training, which did not consist of much information, the trainer admitted that these devices are actually “personal entertainment devices.” After two years of having iPads in the classroom, I see what the trainer meant. Now students have their phones out all the time (even though our student handbook says phones must be kept in the locker). What a joke. We have a technology “free for all” going on. The devices are not being used for learning. They are being used for messaging friends about the latest teen drama.
Don’t allow any student technology during class time. My rule is when you walk in the door you will have put away all electronic devices. You have it out and you will put it on my desk until the end of class. One warning and after that I write them up.
Don’t give any option.
Perhaps the ipads serve servaral purposes:
1) to get Gates’s, et al.’s, fingers into the data and mine it;
2) to spend $ on technology;
3) …technology that supports the one-program, common core; and
4) to distract the young charter school “scholars” from their studies so the dumbed down curriculum “succeeds” in doing as intended?
They are intent on a new world order. It is a THEM vs. the rest. THEY will have the best things in life, and their kids will have the best educations. Your kids? Nothing for them; just a job at walmart.
Why do kids take computerized tests when they have limited keyboarding skills?
Where is the time to teach keyboarding skills?
How can I get Johnny to stop playing online games when my back is turned?
How did it become a teacher’s responsibility to collect cell phones & ipods at the door?
Why is that a tech malfunction happens to a presenter at a conference or PD? (not a reliable tool)
How did requiring the use of technology become a teacher evaluation standard?
Does it make us better teachers?
Why does a tech lab need to consume space in school libraries?
How do we have money for tech gadgets when we have other priorities?
When do we have time to learn how to use the damn things when other changes are dumped on us?
How did we allow the tech world to dominate the education world?
How much being tech savvy needs to come from school? (unless it’s your major)
Why don’t the government supply poverished homes w/tech, if every child is supposed to use the same rubric/standard? (opportunity for all)
Do we feel that technology makes our jobs humanely possible to fulfill on a daily basis?
Who are the real beneficiaries?
I read a report about a new Pearson project to teach keyboarding to 3rd graders for the purpose of. . . .
taking online tests and using online learning software.
THEY would be content giving online keyboarded tests to pre-k and K, no doubt.
Tests for Tots!
All Testing, All the Time!
The geniuses at PARCC (spell that backward) and not-Smarter, imBalanced didn’t figure out that most third graders have a terrible time using computers for writing and that doing math online as opposed to on paper introduces lots and lots and lots of distractions from the math itself–adds a whole other level of distraction AND complexity.
If I ever see another presenter put up a Powerpoint and read from it, I think I will become another spontaneous human combustion causality. LOL!
Good questions, all, jon!
In Ed Tech, one sees a lot of atomic flyswatters-systems that INTRODUCE unnecessary complexities AND treat complex matters indiscriminately and crudely–KA-BOOM!
And, as Tufte demonstrates, one sees in ed tech a LOT of dumbing down.
Tufte documents EXPONENTIAL decreases in information transmitted in the transition from written text to the Powerpoint slide–decreases by hundreds or even thousands of times of the amount of information conveyed.
But many educational publishers are now DOING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN POWERPOINT because the medium forces writers to think in terms of what content will fit on a screen.
In a bullet list
With three points
Buried in a page of graphics
Meant to be appealing
But that kids actually think of as boring and stupid
And here, a REALLY GREAT talk about ed video from Norma and Vivienne Ming:
Their audience at the SXSW ed conference must have had a cow.
They spoke the truth, not what that audience was probably expecting or wanted to hear.
Finnish parents will not allow Gates, Amplify and Pearson to buy their schools. Politicians and the media would not give Rhee a platform. Student/family data mining companies like inBloom or Connectedu wouldn’t receive one contract in Finland. Unlike Gates, Finnish billionaires aren’t social engineers.
May be too late–Microsoft has absorbed Nokia.
Hyper-complex tech solutions for simple problems, boo. Substandard thinking and poor investmet of resources in a finite world. Why press a lever to flush a toilet? Isn’t there an tablet app to do that?
Reblogged this on Professor Olsen @ Large and commented:
Privatizers and educational vendors in the U.S. don’t care about students, they care about $$$$.
“The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.”
“The human hand allows the minds to reveal itself.”
“The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.”
“Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation.”
– Maria Montessori
There are many similarities in the practices of the Finnish education system and Montessori. We learn by doing. We learn by activity. What fools we have become when we are so easily swayed by marketing and corporate greed which sells electronic snake oil.
I disagree with you about this last point, “Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation,” with respect to the Finns. Finland’s National Core Curriculum includes the subject, Ethics, and within it a long bullet list of required points. Here are a few:
Click to access 47673_core_curricula_basic_education_4.pdf
7.12 Ethics
Grades 1-5
CORE CONTENTS
HUMAN RELATIONS AND MORAL GROWTH:
meeting another person and placing oneself in his or her position
good, right and wrong, distinguishing right from wrong, human goodness
the content and meaning of friendship in life
justice, realization of justice in everyday life, wealth and poverty in the world
freedom of thought, freedom of religion and personal philosophy, tolerance and discrimination
a good life, value and norm, responsibility and freedom in life…
Beyond this excerpt from Grades 1-5 are many more headings and points which Finland’s teachers are required to teach and are responsible to cover under the subject heading of Ethics. I find this subject one of the most interesting about Finland’s core curriculum and possibly one reason their social responsibility and peaceful way of life are so strong.
Please, God, no more about Finland.
Wish we could make Arne, Bill and Obama go away, too.
If what you mean is, please, no more about PISA scores, I would agree with you. The reason people pay attention to Finland is that they’re progressive. They live in peace. They have a healthcare system that works. They take care of each other. People like myself want to know how they got there.
The reason they got there is probably because there are about 5 million in the total population, about 99% are of one race with Scandinavian heritage, similar values, and almost 80% belong to the same religion.
Compare that to United States: 316 million people (3rd largest population on the planet behind China and India), thousands of religious choices, regional cultures, multiple ethnic groups and/or cultures and lots more differences.
Lloyd,
The diversity of Finland is, just as you imply, strengthened by the very hard work they engage in to teach their children multiple languages and strong social values as part of their cultural heritage. I hope you will read the extensive curriculum in the mother tongue, the second national language, and the foreign languages required for all students in Finland. In addition, they study religion in public school, since you mentioned it as part of why they succeed educationally. They study both their individual, personal religions as well knowledge of other religions.
Finland, like so many European countries, receives immigrant and refugee populations from the devastation wrought by our blood-thirsty foreign policy. I hope you will read the lengths to which Finland’s teachers go to bring immigrant children into Finnish well being. My point is that the benefits of Finland’s social success didn’t fall on them from out of the sky, making it easy for them to succeed. They work at it, and education is a key part of that work.
Click to access 47671_core_curricula_basic_education_1.pdf
Click to access 47675_POPS_net_new_2.pdf
I think it’s endlessly interesting to learn what others are doing. I have learned A LOT by learning about Japanese approaches to education. A lot that I really value.
I second this…Flerp. Look at Finnish films and you can learn more about their ethos.
And dear Bob…wish I had thought of PARCC spelled backwards. Gonna use that from now on. Thanks.
Linda and Lloyd, re the Finns health care and education…in their socialized country, as in France and Cananda, the people are willing to pay taxes for service for all…unlike in the US where only the middle class pays taxes, and the uber wealthy get endless tax breaks.
Canada, that is…Cananda is an offshoot of Candide and monkeys, or a late night brain hot spot.
It was Don Duane Swacker, Hidalgo, who recognized that this was spelled backward in keeping with the practice of other Goblish grimoires. 🙂
Remind me what it is that we can learn from the Finns that I haven’t been told we can learn from the Finns for the last decade? It’s the same thing, over and over. We take as lessons what we want to take, and we leave what we don’t want. It’s just us talking to ourselves.
What can we learn from the Finns?
Let’s rephrase that into two questions, because it is obvious that U.S. teachers have little to learn from Finland since they beat Finland when we comped the PISA scores based on similar schools with similar poverty rates.
What can the state and national leaders in the United States learn from Finland?
Answer: Congress, the president, governors and elected school boards must learn to let teachers run the schools and make the decision and stay out of telling teachers what to teach and how to do it. And, get out of turning learning into test taking.
What can U.S. parents living in poverty learn from Finland’s parents?
Answer: Parents who live in poverty can start reading to and with their kids at age 3 or find an early childhood education program—-if there is one—-that will do it for them.
Lloyd,
Finland’s government does tell teachers what to teach, right down to the Distribution of Lesson Hours by subject.
Click to access 47674_core_curricula_basic_education_5.pdf
I highly recommend reading in this appendix to the national curriculum. Chapter 3 describes the Distribution of Lesson Hours in mother tongue and literature, (second) language starting in grades 1-7, (third) language starting in grades 7-9, mathematics, environmental studies, biology and geography, physics and chemistry, health education, religion, ethics, history and social studies, music, visual arts, crafts, physical education, home economics, educational and vocational guidance, optional subjects, and voluntary additional language.
Finland’s government may not tell its teachers how to teach these subjects, but it requires them to teach them, with the inclusion of specific, detailed content for the entire education.
I agree with you that the PISA scores are relatively unimportant. But if we want to learn from Finland, it seems reasonable to at least look at their curriculum for what’s there.
Let’s look at that language: You say, “Finland’s government does tell teachers what to teach, right down to the Distribution of Lesson Hours by subject.”
I’m well aware that Finland has uniform standards that teachers are required to teach but like you said, the teachers aren’t told how to teach those standards.
But what you say may be misleading by omission. Finland has standards that they also require of the few private schools (private schools in Finland are treated the same as the public schools—-there’s no double standard like in the US where the private sector charters are not transparent and don’t have to follow the standards being imposed on the public schools). In addition, Finland has no standardized test used to fail and fire teachers and close public schools based on student test scores.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall that Diane and many others, including me, saying there’s nothing wrong with standards if teachers are given the freedom to teach to those standards as they see fit, but the way Obama is pushing his standards in the Untied States has failed and is Machiavellian in the way it was implemented. Watch the video, “They (Finland) does not focus on multiple choice tests versus the U.S. tests more than any country on the earth.”
And let’s not ignore this: poverty in Finland is less than FIVE percent versus TWENTY-THREE percent in the United States.
I should have added, that California had standards that were legislated in 1999 when the development of those standards started, and in my last few years as a teacher, we were all teaching to those standards—they were online and every teacher in English and Math were handed these thick, coffee table sized books that outlined the standards for every grade level—but we had the freedom to teach to those standards with textbooks that teachers adopted and additional material without Obama’s Machiavellian Pearson material controlled Common Core Standards that punish teachers and close public schools based on student test results (with flawed and crappy tests that seem designed to led to massive failures as if it were intentional).
I don’t remember anyone complaining about those standards. We even met by department and went over the standards to identify the ones we would focus on as a department—-again, teachers in every school were involved in development and implementation. There was no secrecy. No confidentiality agreements.
In fact, California should have kept its own standards program but CA dropped that program after more than a decade of developing them with teacher, parent and student involvement in the process from the beginning. There was no secrecy. The results of the tests that were linked to those standards were used by teachers and schools to help teachers improve instruction.
It looked as if California was moving in the right direction and then along came Arne Duncan with his veiled threat that if you didn’t sign up for the federal Common Core standards being pushed by the Obama White House, your state would lose billions in federal funding.
Lloyd,
I agree with everything you say about privatization, vam, binge testing, charters, and the racketeering within the U.S. educational establishment, except when you describe, “flawed and crappy tests that seem designed to led to massive failures as if it were intentional.” I believe it IS intentional. I put nothing past the forces of oppression in this country. They want to end public education.
But I think there is a misconception about Finland, such that its well-prepared teachers are allowed to teach unencumbered by government requirements, and that such academic freedom is the reason for their social and democratic success. When I read their curriculum, I am stunned by the amount of knowledge and skill Finland’s teachers are responsible for providing to their students. I think we need to look at it more closely.
I stand corrected: The Machiavellian Common Core Standards out of the Obama White House were intentionally designed to destroy the public schools and fail public school teachers. And shame on me. I voted for Obama twice. I allowed myself to be fooled into thinking he was the lesser of two evils—-twice.
Yes, let’s look closer at how Finland’s teachers implement the standards that exist there. I know they work together in teacher teams and how one school implements the standards may be different than another school. I understand these teacher teams focus on the needs of the students of the communities they serve.
The U.S. might also learn from France and avoid any mistakes made there on how to implement a common, national, early childhood education system that reaches 100% of children by age 4 and as early as age 3. If France can cut poverty in half with their early childhood education program, we should be looking closely at it.
But please, let’s not let any White House privatize that too. The U.S. could build this program around libraries and/or public schools that are transparent and have to play by the same rules.
Lloyd,
Thank you for responding, and I agree with you completely, especially about the possibility of the privatization of pre-schooling. I voted for President Obama twice also, only out of fear of his opponents gaining power. What a state of affairs.
What worries me is how the election process works. We have little to no control over the candidates who we are allowed to eventually vote for. Our only option is to write names in who don’t appear on the ballet because they didn’t have the support of a major party machine.
And the president is not elected by the popular vote but by about 500 members of the Electoral College and those members are all appointed by the major political parties. I’m sure that who owns the parties, has a major voice in who those members are.
That’s how we ended up with G. W. Bush when he ran against Gore. Gore had the popular vote. Bush ended up with the Electoral College vote.
The United States is not ruled by the people. It’s ruled by a small number of people and that number seems to be shrinking.
What totally affirms the Finnish attitude towards technology is the remarkable success of the Bard College prison initiative and the John Jay College prison initiative. In Both cases, the students in prison achieve at remarkable levels without any use of technology at all.
Thanks for mentioning these. I want to learn more about them!
Comparing one small, relatively homogenous country with a much larger, more diverse country, whether it’s Japan/US or Finland/US, or… has limitations. One of the reasons Finland has received a lot of attention is that it has down well on international tests that many people who post here distrust. However
* In recent international math and science exams, both Massachusetts and Mn have done better than Finland
* Finland has considerable respect for teacher autonomy and family beliefs. This has led the country to financially support schools created by groups of teachers (similar to teacher run charter public schools). Finland also financially supports church related schools. We would call this practices vouchers.
Finland has considerable respect for teacher autonomy and family beliefs. This has led the country to financially support schools created by groups of teachers (similar to teacher run charter public schools).
very, very, important. I have always been impressed by how ordinary people, when given autonomy and responsibility, rise to the occasion. This was THE GREAT LESSON of the quality control revolution in industry during the 20th cent. And you can see this in operation on any jury. People are intrinsically motivated. And no one gets up in the morning and says, I want to do a really lousy job of my job today. Until, of course, someone takes away his or her autonomy.
And on this business of alternative schools–public school systems have a lot to answer for there. In the past few decades, public school systems have become more and more regimented, top-down. Local school autonomy gave way first to district control then to state control and now to federal control, and there has been more and more regimentation and standardization, and it’s no wonder that people are looking for alternatives.
I long to see those from within the public school system. But here is the bottom line for me: KIDS DIFFER. One size does NOT fit all.
Bob (and others who agreed that there’s no single best kind of school for all students, educators or families), here’s a website that may interest you:
http://www.teacherpowered.org/
Some of these 60 some “teacher powered” schools in 15 states are part of districts, some are charters. They represent an effort to empower educators and meet real student needs.
Joe, that’s all VERY, VERY EXCITING. Thank you for the link!
Lots to consider. Thanks for your interest.
Thanks, Joe!
This post has obviously struck a chord. While I admire some of my colleagues’ savvy use of tehnology, I never feel less of a teacher for my lack of it. As an English teacher, words, language and great story telling are enough to stimulate students. What could be better than reading and acting out scenes from works like The Crucible, The Great Gatsby or A Streetcar Named Desire, with a little movie day here, lit crit there? Nothing. They are already hooked on Streetcar just two measly pages in!
Shelley…I would hope you would never feel remiss for not be a techie. Language arts is the main skill all of us need. We do not learn to communicate and interact as humans by texting nor blogging. It is only through the use of language, verbal use as with face to face conversation, that people become civilized. The amazing literature you are teaching touches on all of the human condition. You are doing the most valuable job.
yes yes yes
If recruiting only excellent students into the teaching profession is the solution, then what should we do with all the current teachers who were not excellent students?
In a system where compensation and retention are based on seniority, I don’t see how that could ever happen.
Marty,
How is it possible to recruit only the best students into a profession that is constantly under attack?
Marty should also prove that a higher GPA also means the teacher works harder, is more dedicated and successful in the classroom. The facts say this is not true.
GPA means the college student earned higher grades but that does not mean they will be better teachers. There is a vast difference between doing school work and dealing with all the challenges that comes with teaching.
Why, Diane, does your question not occur to these dolts in the Deform movement?
Most teachers I know are totally demoralized by the evaluation processes they encounter. It’s really, really sad. Most would say, “Don’t go into this profession.”
That’s just horrible, of course!
It isn’t possible.
Why do people think recruiting only excellent students is the answer? I don’t agree with that. The solution is increasing compensation and improving the work environment. Respect will follow those changes. Recruitment won’t be an issue. Personally, I believe merit pay (based on peer and administrator evaluation) would help solve this, but that is a debate for another day.
Lloyd, as far as me proving that a teacher’s GPA correlates with anything, please reread my original post. Much of the reflexive, reactionary rhetoric here reminds me of the reformers you criticize.
I was a decent student. I excelled in subjects that interested me and did what was necessary in the others. The secret to good teaching is having the interest in interacting with people to try to reach them to overcome obstacles they encounter. This quality cannot be measured by a GPA. It involves a willingness to listen to the stories of other people. There is very little that is similar between the childhoods of my students
and the way I was raised. I hope to share with
them life lessons I have learned. None of these musings have anything whatsoever to do with technology. Sorry!
wonderful, NJ Teacher!
What is culture? Well, it’s the sum of all the stuff that we aren’t born with—that we learn and then pass on to others. That which we pass on to others is culture.
Schools are a primary means by which a culture is passed from one generation to the next. They are not the only means, but they are an important one.
At its core, teaching and learning are TRANSACTIONAL. Education is a TRANSACTION whereby people pass on to others that which matters to them and assist those others in not only mastering that material but in submitting it to critique and improving it and surpassing it.
What kinds of things are passed down? Well, world knowledge for one (knowledge of what), and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) for another. This bark is good for headache. Soak the flax like his to soften it and separate the fibers to make linen. And, of course, via education we pass on our values.
Anyone who wants to downplay or eliminate this transactional, human component of education just doesn’t grok what education is ESSENTIALLY about.
And that’s why these folks who run about saying that class size doesn’t matter or that we can eliminate teachers and replace them with computer-adaptive teaching programs creep me out. They just don’t get it.
Teaching, there is no app for that.
Remember what I said about how schools teach values? Here’s the interesting thing about values: kids learn their them not from what we tell them they should do but from what we do.
And one of the most fundamental values that we must reinforce is the value of learning itself. Ideally, a teacher is a model for students of what an intrinsically motivated, life-long independent learner looks like. It’s a waste of time and breath to say to kids, “You ought to learn this.” The way we communicate that is by showing them: “I learned this. Isn’t it cool? You can learn this, too.” Kids should look at their learned teachers and what those teachers know and can do and say, “Wow. That’s really, really cool. I want some of that.”
I’ve already written, above, about problems with ed tech. But here’s a summary of the major problems that I see:
1. All glitz and no substance. A lot of this stuff is really, really, really dumbed down. The student comes away from 15-minute lesson with lots and lots of graphics and music and interactivity and blah blah blah having learned something that could have been communicated in a single sentence. Read Tufte’s piece on Powerpoint. He calls a lot of this stuff “chart junk.” It’s empty filler. But, hey, it looks good. I have reviewed whole programs of ed tech for a given grade level, the entire content of which could be restated in four or five prose paragraphs. I am not exaggerating there. I wish I were.
2. Demotivating. A lot of this stuff is sold on the basis of being interesting and interactive, but the truth is, kids get bored with it really, really quickly. And there is a reason for that. Much of this stuff is built around extrinsic punishment and reward systems. Earn points so you can get your name on the leaderboard! But study after study after study of motivation shows that the moment you offer an external reward, people become LESS motivated by the object of attention itself. So, for example, if you take two groups of people, of any age, and ask them to test out some puzzle games, but you offer to PAY one group, the paid group actually plays with the puzzles LESS. Moral of that: People respond to that which is INTRINSICALLY MOTIVATING, not to that which has had EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION attached, but an awful lot of this ed tech does the latter.
3. Invariant. One of the ways that you built intrinsic motivation is that you seize upon student interest and help students to pursue that. That little Yolanda is fascinated by astronauts or guppies can be spun out in amazing ways. But ed tech, for all the hype about personalization, tends to be invariant. It tests in order to drop kids down into a preprogrammed sequence of instruction that doesn’t respond to who the kid is and where the kid wants to go, which a human teacher can EASILY do. (BTW, a lot of research tells us that creatures of all kind respond more strongly to intermittent reward than to invariant reward, but many of these programs have invariant reward or punishment systems built into them. One of the reasons for the addictiveness of video games is that they use invariant reward, and they are not demotivating because the player brings his or her motivation to the game and doesn’t seek it solely from the game.)
4. Constricted in Its Feedback. One of the useful characteristics of ed tech is that it can continually test and give feedback. The folks who designed the first programmed learning materials back in the 1940s were rightly very, very excited about this. But the feedback in these educational software programs OFTEN lacks the subtlety of the feedback that a teacher can give. It misses the important stuff, the real problem or the subtle part of what the student has done that is unusual and valuable. Furthermore, HUMAN FEEDBACK means something to people that feedback given by a machine does not. Very, very quickly, the “Great job, Yolanda!” responses of the educational software just get to be ANNOYING. You can actually watch Yolanda roll her eyes every time it pops up.
Now, all THAT said, here are some things that ed tech CAN do for us:
1. It can make available resources that otherwise would not be available and so allow for personalization. You have a little math genius at your school but cannot afford to offer classes in calculus and differential equations? Well, you can have that kid take online classes. A school library might contain 7,000 books. A kid with a tablet can have access to MILLIONS of books. It can provide access to the knowledge of the world. Want to know how one learns to drive a dirigible? The meaning of the word mamihlapinatapei? What the Greek philosopher Hypatia is known for? Your answer is a click or two away. The internet has given us access to the great universal library—something unprecedented in history and of UNPRECEDENTED educational value, but many school systems almost completely shut down that access, which is criminally stupid. Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
2. Ed tech can allow students to work anywhere, anytime.
3. It can provide wonderful opportunities for students to publish their creations.
4. It can provide opportunities for students and educators to collaborate and to crowd source. It can be used to create learning communities and sharepoint servers for those communities.
5. It can take students to amazing places—inside a cell, to the surface of a star, to a hall of a king in late Iron Age Britain, to the moment of the Big Bang. There they can have mind-blowingly interesting experiences.
6. It can be an astonishingly useful tool for demonstration. Want to understand how AC and DC motors work? Well, I can tell you about these forever, and you still won’t understand. But an animated graphic can show you these things in operation and zoom in and describe the parts and you will be able to see for yourself how they function, how they work together, and their principles of operation will become extraordinarily clear. In other words, ed tech can be used to SHOW, not TELL.
7. It can allow for experiment and observation. Here’s a city. Change a variable. Plug in a 2% annual population growth rate. Or a 2% annual increase in atmospheric CO2. See what happens. Wow. Here’s a prisoner’s dilemma game. Play it with your friend. Try various strategies. See how these work out over the long term. Surprising, huh?
Just a few thoughts, off the top of my head. Not at all a complete treatment of the topic of ed tech. Not AT ALL. But I thought some on this site dedicated to a better education for all might be interested.
A couple good rules of thumb:
OPPOSE PUSH TECHNOLOGIES. OPPOSE TOP-DOWN , PROPRIETARY ONES.
DEMAND PULL TECHNOLOGIES, OPEN ACCESS, OPEN SOURCE, and CROWD SOURCED.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx OK, I’ll bite. What are the trumpeted ed tech features, exactly?
I use some tech for teaching foreign lang to ages 3-13. The primary application that helps me as a teacher: (a)word processing,& (b)programs that allow you to do data manipulation in a very minor way (I’m talking quizlet). (a) is of limited value to students, who either don’t know qwerty well enough for it to be a time-saver, &or don’t have recent enough windows to simplify using accent marks. (b) is a nice feature for occasional use by students but not earth-shaking. There’s (c)dragon-type applications which use mike & a program to help self-improve accent & speed. (c) is rarely available, & at most useful for special cases who struggle with accent. And (d)most useful for youngsters, search/youtube [done w/parents only!] to practice foreign-lang songs, colors, numbers.
I’m omitting from the list the audio packages that accompany textbooks, which are no different from ‘language labs’ of the 1970’s.
I can imagine there might be some [perhaps very expensive] CADD- & CG-derived applications helpful for higher math. And basic games like math blaster, handy for younger kids to review skills.
Anything else? As you can see I’m no techie, so help me out here. In my perhaps limited experience, the ed tech available qualifies as ‘helpful adjunct’ but is hardly transformative.
This is the Ohio version of Arne Duncan’s RttT lottery.
They are planning to award a 2 million grant to ECOT, which is the single worst school in the state, a huge online charter school.
The grant is so that the charter school can export their cheap, online learning “system” that replaces expensive human beings with a screen and a cubicle, to middle-schoolers state-wide.
Thanks but no thanks, ed reformers. You keep it. We think our students will do just fine without “efficient” (read: cheap and therefore profitable) math instruction.
http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Straight-A-Fund/First-Round-FY14-Grant-Material/Straight-A-GrantFinalists.pdf.aspx
The ed reformers feel tech is their ace card but public schools have caught up fairly quickly with tech as of late. Why do we need them and their yucky philosophies and even worse policies ? We can figure out tech and its best use ourselves. We don’t need musical chairs (Chicago) to make improvements at our local, free, and public schools. Tech has its place, we can figure it out without some grand mandate.
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG.
Who can discount Bob’s concern that the legions of iPads and computers are primarily Trojan horses, setting teachers up for replacement by Khan Academy-type, piped-in instruction? The scary thing to me is that much of this instruction may indeed be better than what many of us teachers are able to put together. It’ll be Hollywood vs. three million home video producers. Yeah, parents may make a stink, but alas it’s easy to overestimate Americans’ willingness to get politically involved. Hard to resist the siren call of Candy Crush!
Gates has said as much, but he says it out loud only about post-secondary education. But that’s what all these Rheeformish memes about class sizes not mattering and flipped classes REALLY refer to. It’s breathtaking to me that the union leaders don’t see that.
So, an interviewer asks Gates about why he wants such a standardized system when he himself was anything but a standard student. Check out the interchange:
Interviewer: “You’ve said that when you were in high school, you followed your own interests, taking on independent study, working on computer programming day and night. Is there room for that kind of student-driven learning in a highly rigorous, metrics-based environment?”
Gates “People who are as curious as I am will be fine in any system. For the self-motivated student, these are the golden days. I wish I was growing up now. I envy my son. If he and I are talking about something that we don’t understand, we just watch videos and click on articles, and that feeds our discussion. Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
“In general, the idea that you are tested on your ability to multiply and divide is a good thing.”
Meaning: I was special. Everyone else needs the regime of invariant standards and testing I am implementing.
Also note that he suggests that the standards and testing are just to make sure that the basic skills are in place, but check this out, from another interview with Gates:
Gates: “One of the strengths of higher ed is the variety. But the variety has also meant that if somebody is doing something particularly well, it’s hard to map that across a lot of different institutions. . . . We don’t have a gold standard like SAT scores or No Child Left Behind up at the collegiate level.”
So, now it’s not just basic skills. It’s a whole system of standardized testing all the way up, through college. Gates talks elsewhere, often, about how employers want a system that will tell them, across schools, just what skills kids are coming out of college with. Oh, and you can pay for all that testing easily because you don’t need a lot of professors:
Gates: “We can take the lecture piece versus that study-group piece and make the lecture piece more of a shared element, and not have to have that duplicated again and again.”
Translation: We can videotape one professor and kids can listen to those videotapes in the software package that I sell to their universities, and we can fire the rest of those professors and save a ton of money.
I don’t know about you, but I find this vision of the future of education REALLY CREEPY.
“a gold standard like SAT scores or No Child Left Behind”
Yikes. This guy actually thinks that the SAT and No Child Left Behind represent “a gold standard”
Bill, the SAT was supposed to predict success in college. But it was invalid for that purpose. Grades given by those terrible teachers you so revile have always been FAR BETTER PREDICTORS OF COLLEGE SUCCESS than was the SAT, which was, doubtless, the most vetted standardized test ever and yet ALMOST USELESS for the purpose for which it was created (to predict college success).
And has it ever occurred to you, Bill, why NCLB is the most hated federal program in recent memory?
Clearly not, for what you have given us is Son of NCLB, the Nightmare Is Nationalized.
Could you please just go back to making lousy encyclopedias on CD or something?
I can tell you one thing, Bill, your words “a highly curious student is a small percentage of students” will certainly be the case if you get your wishes for U.S. education. Your vision WILL ABSOLUTELY KILL ANY INTRINSIC MOTIVATION TO LEARN THAT STUDENTS HAVE, and it will COMPLETELY DEMORALIZE AND DEMOTIVATE THEIR TEACHERS, and it will ENFORCE MEDIOCRITY.
It’s already doing that.
It is an arrogant comment – there are lots of curious students eager to explore and learn – some of them, despite circumstances Gates has never known.
Love this comment, caligirl! “despite circumstances Gates has never known.” Precisely.
This comment by him absolutely infuriates me. Every child is born innately curious, breathtakingly so. See Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby or The Scientist in the Crib, for example. (Gopnik is a researcher who studies the thought processes of babies.) At any rate, in order to produce kids who are no longer “highly curious,” we have to work really, really hard at KILLING THAT IN THEM.
And, of course, the certain way to do that is via a regimented, standardized, extrinsic punishment and reward system of the kind that Gates is pushing on the country. He is doing a lot of harm to little children and should be ashamed of himself. Eventually, when we move past this “accountability” era and regain our senses, his campaign will be looked upon with horror.
Jean-Paul Sartre says in Being and Nothingness that schools exist to make children ashamed of what they are. Well, Gates-style education does a superb job of accomplishing that.
In addition to being my school’s technology teacher I also teach two classes of 6th grade ancient history. This year I moved the program to an almost paperless classroom (notes are still taken on paper in cursive as studies have shown this to be more effective learning). Before switching I confirmed that all but one student had easy access to both technology (desktop, laptop, tablet) and a high speed Internet connection at home.
Second, all the work students needed to do at home was setup to be operating system agnostic. Google Docs being the foundation for content creation, delivery, etc.
Third, to keep kids on task and not surfing the web, checking social media accounts, or playing games I move about the room constantly. Nothing more than simple best practices. I have had a few students go off task and play a game. They lost usage of the iPad for a week along with after school detention. No student has made the same mistake twice.
Four, in class content creation using such apps as Explain Everything and Educreations allows for a wide variety of learning styles to be used.
As you one can see I’ve adapted the first two levels of the SAMR method for technology in the classroom. For next year I’ve been green-lighted into taking the next step, project-based learning.
The point to my post is that technology can with the correct implementation and training (teacher, student, and parent) improve the level and passion for learning among students.
I am a big fan of technology. My favorite technologies for the classroom:
The pencil.
Paper.
The book.
I will use the others for specific purposes. But the idea of having some committee at some publishing house groupthink my students’ lessons is completely anathema to me and would be, I think, to any teacher worthy of the name.
Much of the Ed Deform infatuation with technology seems, to me, really puerile and doltish, very gee whiz. One has to wade through a lot of really, really awful ed tech to find anything worth spending any time on whatsoever in the classroom. And kids have excellent crap detectors. They look at these dumb ed tech products that feature Mario the Pizza man singing the lowest common factor rap and they find the stuff insulting and ridiculous. Kids are a lot smarter than developers give them credit for being.
I remember once when my daughter was in first grade, and I had a bunch of textbooks I was examining on a table, and she said to me, “Why do all the pictures seem so perfect?” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “None of the kids look like real kids at all.” And, of course, the photos of kids were all these stock photo shots of perfectly coifed, pretty children, dressed in new clothes in primary colors and completely PHONEY. And she saw that immediately. She was SIX YEARS OLD.
Our kids, today, experience good technology ALL THE TIME. They are little connoisseurs of high tech. And when they see the glitzy shlock from the online education companies, they tend to groan and roll their eyes. OMG, another completely inane, stupid Flash video teaching cartoon that I am supposed to find interesting. These people need to get a clue. It’s only the adults around them who are suckered into thinking that this dumbed down crap is interesting just because it contains multimedia elements. The kids don’t. They can tell when, looking at a lesson, there is no real substance there. They can tell because they are bored out of their minds.
Bob,
I agree with everything you say about tech ed here and elsewhere, but because this discussion is about Finland’s approach to tech in school, such that they have not been nailed as we are being nailed with yet another sale of useless junk, because they are demonstrably wiser, I hope this topic will move you to look at Finland’s core curriculum if you haven’t yet. It seems to emphasize what you advocate, knowing the what and knowing the how.
A good teacher can do more with an old-fashioned piece of chalk and a blackboard than a lousy teacher could if he or she had the design team of Pixar sitting in the next room at his or her command. Seriously.
Kids want to think and experience things they haven’t thought and experienced before. They aren’t impressed just because something goes flash and boom and tells them, “Great Job, Robert!” Quite the opposite.
I would go so far to say that a good teacher can teach outside in the sand with a stick and a rock. It just takes interested students and the freedom to learn. And then it can grow from there.
Literally true.
I’ve read that the shape of the figure for zero comes from the impression left by a stone in the sand when you take that stone away.
It would be fun to take a bunch of teachers and give them this assignment. OK, here’s a sandbox, a stick, and a rock. Teach something. I suspect that one would get some wonderful variety.
Recipe
A stick, some sand, a rock,
Add a teacher, students
Mix well
Yield: a culture
–with apologies to the late Maya Angelou
As a coach we had a saying ” We can teach kids how to play baseball in a parking lot if that is all we have”
So when will we begin to address poverty in a meaningful, substantive way in our country?
I think this article sets up a false dichotomy. Finland’s educational system focuses first and foremost on teacher quality and preparation. The top college students in Finland go into teaching, rather than Wall St or Silicon Valley. I wonder how much of a factor technology is, one way or the other? I suspect Finland’s teachers would do quite well in tech-centric classrooms, as they do in tech-lite classrooms.
There are two separate questions here. One is: how do we build the best and brightest teaching staff in American schools? Two is: how should we integrate technology in education? To argue that one is related to the other is a distraction, and avoids the real issues.
johnranta ,
Finland’s National Core Curriculum is fascinating to read.
Click to access 47671_core_curricula_basic_education_1.pdf
I think the point of Dr. Ravitch’s highlighting of the Politico piece about Finland is that the FInns don’t find it necessary to binge on technological gadgetry in order to provide a good education. My personal experience is that it is very Scandinavian to understand that sometimes less is more. I also understand that Finland is not part of Scandinavia, so I correct myself. But they’re definitely Nordic.
Teacher preparation is one of their acknowledged strengths, but they also have a very detailed, well-structured curriculum which describes what Finland’s students will receive. Education is seen as the children’s preparation for life, and it is likewise well thought out.
It isn’t you who has written this, but I often read in discussions about Finland’s education system that the teachers are well prepared and then the government gets out of the way and lets them teach. When I read from their curriculum, however, I am overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge, skill, and experience Finnish teachers are required to provide to their students. I also read that they make up their own assessments. True enough, but again, the assessments are structured within the curriculum and its requirements, and the government defines, on a numerical scale, what constitutes “good performance.”
I think there are misconceptions about what actually happens in Finland, and I advocate paying close attention to what they do. Why? Because they live in peace, and we don’t.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Finnish schools teach us simple but undeniable fact about teaching:
Technology CANNOT replace basic human interaction in the classroom.
It’s always been about the learning, not the technology, television, textbook, etc. That said, it’s awfully difficult to prepare graduates for a digital world if they don’t get to use digital learning tools in meaningful ways in school.
Not sure what the point is here. Doesn’t the article state that the Finns also are investing in ‘tablets, laptops, and other devices?’ And why wouldn’t we invest in those as educators, given that personal computing devices coupled with the Internet constitute the most powerful learning tools yet invented by mankind?